


illusions vaporizing above the concrete

by enmity



Category: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 18:49:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12216792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: This isn’t selfishness.





	illusions vaporizing above the concrete

The thing with younger siblings is that they’re supposed to be the selfish ones. It’s not so much a fact as it is a rule, and Naoya knows this, of course he does, but it’s not until he’s pushing the paper bag into Yuzu’s hands and muttering the flimsy excuse he’s had rehearsed for weeks that he finds himself thinking about  _how_.

It’s been too long since he’s had to think about it; enough time for him to have slipped from one wasted once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to another, in fact. But a heart is still all that it is, that one solitary adjective, and if all the myriad of complications that come with having an imperfectly  _human_  heart were just that — hurdles, or some other word that’d make it sound like a snag, a road-bump, something easy enough to vault over or recover from — then he wouldn’t have given up trying to restrain it in the first place. At least, not completely.

He hadn’t succeeded the first time, after all. God had seen to that.

He watches Yuzu sigh, her discontented face faltering under his scrutiny; watches her retreating back as she turns a corner of the street, soles skidding against the pavement. No cracks. Naoya doesn’t put any stock in nebulous graces granted from higher beings, but he supposes it’s a small enough reassurance he can find appreciation in.

He keeps watching the length of the street for a little longer than acceptable after that. The girl is out of sight. The pieces are being set, and now, all that’s left is to wait it out under the swelter of the noonday sky. The last moment of utter mundane, before the familiarity of peace becomes a lofty, shattered privilege. The shards of it scattered about to find and then assemble back together — in a new form, Naoya hopes. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

—which, incidentally, brings him back to the subject at hand (somehow).

The difference between fact and rule: one is unwavering.

The other, malleable. Exceptions to facts are called anomalies, paradoxes; exceptions to rules are just that. Exceptions. The exceptions prove the rule. Following that logic there’s nothing particularly strange about a younger brother who happens to play pawn in the elder’s meticulous chess game against God, a plan that happens to be lifetimes in the making and one the elder simply can’t  _afford_  to lose. The same way there isn’t anything particularly unusual about the fact that he’s Cain and his brother’s Abel and one killed the other and if it sounds wrong it isn’t: siblings maim and kill each other all the time. It happens.  

It makes little difference to know Cain just happened to be the first of them.

Older brothers can be selfish. Younger brothers can be all sorts of things: self-sacrificing, blessed and favored, and killed all the same. (And whose fault would that be — who’d been the one to let that happen? Funny, that.)

By the time the first night ends and the light of his COMP flickers in display of a message sent, Naoya has come to one conclusion: this isn’t selfishness.

Kazuya can choose to play pawn, or forge a path of his own. (The possibility that it might be following that of God’s will not start to sink its teeth until the third, fourth day. Better to rationalize while the circumstances allow him to.) A stupid, misguided one it might be, but still his own. Perhaps he would come to understand before then. Perhaps not.

Naoya closes the COMP. The backlight dies, the screen’s suffusing glow disappearing. The moonlight falls into the room through the gap in the window in a slanted wedge, just bright enough to illuminate the particular way Loki is smiling at him from where he’s sitting across the room. The intrigue’s long since drained away from the pursuit of trying to figure out what that smile actually means, so Naoya doesn’t spare Loki an opening in the form of acknowledgement, or a stray gaze thrown his way.

What’s that term again, the one those servants of God detest so much —  _free will_. It isn’t selfishness on Naoya’s part if he’s giving Kazuya a choice. He just thinks his brother deserves at least that.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry for the reupload, all mistakes are mine etc. kazuya/naoya, "selfishness". written quickly some weeks ago for a friend on tumblr.


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